A small trend has started – stations running Bill Bennett’s Morning in America, late at night!
It makes sense in a way – if you are trying to draw the audience still using clock radios, the people are going to wake up listening to the station they fell asleep listening to. Advertisers don’t care about the 11 PM audience – but they care a lot about people waking up at 6:30 going to a job at 8 o’clock – people why have money to buy a car, go to dinner at restaurants, buy season tickets to sporting events, etc.
Bill Bennett has the voice and personality for a late night host – soft, friendly, kind of a monotone with a low volume level, rarely gets loud or excited. Late at night, I figure about two minutes of Bennett and I’m in REM dreaming about corn grits.
Back in the 1980’s when Larry King was pre-CNN (and much more tolerable IMHO), the Mutual network would run the “best of King” on weekends overnight (Sunday nights in most markets).
The show consisted of compiled guest interviews for the previous week. I used to play it in my earphones every Sunday night while living in a noisy college dorm. I usually listened to Larry’s show live throughout the week so the interviews on Sunday nights were all ‘re-runs’ to my brain. Because the interviews were not ‘new’ to me, it actually helped me sleep (and drowned out some of the noise of my dorm mates). A side effect of this time period is that I still have perfect recall of the old ‘gold bond’ medicated powder ads!
(yes, I was so geeky in college that I listened to talk radio — pathetic, right?)
I listened to talk radio shows during my college days so based on that standard I guess that makes me geeky too.
Hmmmm…technically speaking morning starts at 12:00.01. So yeah, he will be heard in the morning.